Thursday, August 8, 2013

An interview with Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Lawrence in
Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
is ostensibly the story of T.E. Lawrence's
work in the Middle East during World War I- but you've got to know that a 500
page book is going to cover a little more than that. Scott Anderson paints a
picture of the stale Ottoman Empire that finally fulfills its centuries-old
destiny as the Sick Man of Europe and comes tumbling down with all of the
violence you'd imagine something that large and diseased would cause. There to acquire
as much as they could were the British, French and later the Americans. Can we
forgive them for making such a mess because they were preoccupied in Europe?

I'm grateful that Anderson took time to talk
to me about not only Lawrence but also the Scramble for Africa, the other
Western adventurers who connived in the region, Woodrow Wilson, the unraveling
of the modern Middle East, and what, if anything, the West can do to fix what
we broke.

Why is T.E. Lawrence’s personality so
important when we consider his achievements?

Lawrence endured an extreme
crisis of conscience in Arabia, torn between serving Great Britain and the Arab
rebels whom he had joined in the field. What made this crisis acute was that,
due to his position in the military intelligence apparatus in Cairo, Lawrence
knew full well that the Arabs were probably going to be betrayed by Britainat the end of the war. As a result, he placed
himself in a kind of fragile intermediary role, which also meant technically
committing treason by informing the Arabs of the secret deal cut between
Britain and France. Lawrence was able to do this—and to sufficiently cover his
tracks to avoid being caught out—primarily for two reasons: 1) his utter
disdain for military culture and Britain's imperial schemes, which also meant
he wasn't going to simply "obey orders", and 2) he was a master
bureaucratic infighter. Due to his highly-sensitive position in military
intelligence – virtually nothing was so classified as to be beyond his purview—he
knew where all the principal power blocs in the British military and political
spheres lay, who was allied or opposed to whom, and he masterfully manipulated
these blocs and personalities to get what he wanted. Even more, he was able to
do so without the finger of blame ever being pointed back to him. Put in a less
exotic environment, say in the corporate world, this is a guy you would never
want to be in competition or rivalry with, because he would outmaneuver you
before you'd even realized it!

What is happening in the Middle
East today is a final unraveling of the arbitrary borders and divisions put in
place at the end of World War I by the Western powers. These lines were drawn
with little to no thought of what actually constituted cohesive political units—or
nations—but rather to what most benefited the Western powers—specifically Great
Britain and France—from an economic standpoint. It should also be said that
these powers gave shockingly little thought to the process—they were far more
exercised about rearranging the European chessboard—because the Middle East was
a sideshow and no one anticipated it would become the strategic center of the
universe within a few decades' time. While these arbitrary lines held for
nearly a century—first through colonial control and then by extremely
repressive military and/or dynastic regimes—the passions ignited by the Iraq
war and now by the so-called "Arab Spring" revolts means an end to
them. We are already seeing the forces of disintegration at work in Iraq, which
will soon become essentially three nations (although American administrations
will still pay lip-service to the idea of it being unified), and in Libya,
where the flourishing of the regional divide that has always lain under the
surface is rapidly leading to de facto east and west mini-states in the
post-Qaddafi era.

Some of the most maddening moments in the
book were when Lawrence or even some of his out-of-touch superiors called out
problems with burgeoning World War One agreements: the agreement the British
negotiated with the Zionists would lead to conflict with the Arabs; the Saud
family was reactionary and unpopular with many in the region; and ceding
control of Syria to France was going to lead to continuing conflict. But
ultimately those agreements or principles prevailed. Why?

I think it largely goes to my
answer up above, which is that no one in a position of power at the end of World War I really gave the Middle East a lot of
thought. Or put a slightly different way, they simply didn't care: the Middle
East was the divvying-up ground, with concessions made or favors granted to one
or another power there (and again, we're mainly talking about Britain and
France, but also Italy and Greece) in order to achieve consensus for the
"more important" postwar arrangements in Europe. One other point to
this. To truly understand the blithe arrogance with which the European powers
regarded the Middle East at this time, one must look at the imperial event
which immediately preceded it, the so-called "Scramble for Africa,"
in which virtually the entire African continent was conquered and subjugated in
a mere 30-year period. Certainly the imperial powers were aware of how the lines
they had drawn in Africa cut across tribal and ethnic lines, but who cared? It
wasn't as if the indigenous populations were in a position to do anything about
it. I think this had a huge effect on the European imperial mindset when
looking at the Middle East, that these were hapless "little brown
people" that they could subjugate and divide up as they saw fit. In that,
they guessed very wrong.

Lawrence is the star of your book, but you spend a significant amount
of time on three other men: the German Curt Prufer, the American William Yale
and the Jewish Aaron Aaronsohn. Why do they deserve a spotlight in the story of
how the modern Middle East was formed?

One of the little epiphanies I
had in first thinking about writing on Lawrence, the challenge of saying
something new (there have been literally scores of biographies of him), came
when I decided to look at the core riddle of his life. In a nutshell, how did a
28-year-old Oxford scholar without a single day of military
training go off to Arabia and become not just a leader of the Arab rebels but a
crucial player in the geopolitics of the region? The answer: because no one in
a position of authority—and I'm thinking specifically of the British here—was
paying much attention. All their attention was focused on Europe. From that
little breakthrough, it occurred to me if that inattention was true about
Britain, by far the biggest imperial player in the region, then it must have
been true about the other competitors as well. With that idea in mind, I then
began searching around for other spies/intelligence agents who might have
operated in the Middle Eastern theater, and eventually came across Prufer, Aaronsohn
and Yale—in Yale's case, literally the only American field intelligence officer
in the entire Middle East. Like Lawrence, these other men were all brilliant, ambitious
and utterly ruthless. They didn't achieve Lawrence's fame, but each had a profound
influence on their nation's (or, in Aaronsohn's case, the Zionist movement's)
policy and standing in the region and a hand in shaping the Middle East of
today.

Most people don’t know about the atrocities inflicted on the Armenians
during the First World War, but it comes up quite a bit in your book. How
important was the fate of the Armenians to the characters in your book?

I think it was especially
important to the Jews, in that as another frequently-distrusted religious
minority within the Ottoman Empire, they feared they could easily be the next
group to suffer the Armenians' fate. This helped fuel Allied anti-Ottoman
propaganda in general, and also provided a guy like Aaronsohn with a certain
plausibility when he raised an international alarm by claiming (quite
inaccurately) that the Jews in Palestine were about to be purged.

One of your subtler points, I thought, was that the Jews weren’t the
only ones suffering in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. The Armenians did very
badly, as did some Arab groups, as did other ethnicities, but they got nothing
or close to it. Why is that important when we consider this period and region?

I think the end-result of the
selling-out of the Arabs at the end of World War Iwas
to create a culture of resentment and grievance against the West (again,
primarily directed at Britain and France, but also at the United States for its
failure to intervene) that continues to be felt throughout the entire region.
And because the West has no choice but to stay involved in that region (oil),
it will continue to suffer the repercussions.

That probably is true. I have to
say my view of Wilson underwent a rather dramatic overhaul over the course of
writing this book, that where before I regarded him as a kind of high-minded
intellectual done in by his own unwillingness to compromise his ideals, I now feel
that his flaws were actually a lot more base,that
he was extremely vindictive (in the words of his private secretary, "he's
a good hater") and steeped in a sanctimonious worldview that largely
derived from his ignorance of that world. More to the point, he made matters
worse in the Middle East. At least the British and French leaders knew they
were operating completely out of their own national self-interest. By his grand
talk of recognizing the rights of "small nations" and self-rule,
Wilson dramatically raised expectations among native peoples everywhere that
the United States would stand against the imperial designs of theEuropean powers, but then he turned around and did
nothing. There are a number of other things about Wilson—his decision to resegregate
the American civil service, for example—that have left me wondering why
he continues to enjoy such an esteemed position in American history.

If we (Britain, France, the US et al)
"broke" the region, what can we do to fix it a century later?

To
be honest, I'm really not sure there's much we (the West) can do at this point
to fix it, because the divide operates on so many levels—political,
ideological, cultural—and much like the blue-red state division in this country,
it seems to be growing wider all the time. One initiative that would help would
be for the West to broker/force a peace settlement between Israel and the
Palestinians, although even this would not be the regional panacea some might
imagine; the current turmoil in the Middle East now far transcends the Israeli
question. Besides any Israel/Palestine settlement would require the American government
to put serious pressure on Israel to make major concessions, which is simply not
going to happen under either a Democrat or Republican administration. Sorry,
but nobody ever went broke being a pessimist about the Middle East!

--

Scott Anderson is
a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt,
Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, El Salvador and many other
strife-torn countries. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine,
his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair,Esquire, Harper's and Outside.
He is the author of novels Moonlight Hotel and Triage and of
non-fiction books The Man Who Tried to Save the World and The 4 O'Clock Murders, and co-author of War
Zones and Inside The League with his brother Jon Lee Anderson.

Please check here for
more information about Anderson's book Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit,
Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.